I was curious how the abstract BuildSupport class is working that does all those great things for e.g. the SwingBuilder and AntBuilder.

So I wrote the following Groovy Test that exposes its behaviour:

The SpoofBuilder is a sample instance of the abstract BuilderSupport class that does nothing but logging how it was called, returning 'x' for each node.

The test sections call the SpoofBuilder in various ways and the log reveals what methods were called during the "Build".

This test allowed me to verify my assumption on how the builder pattern works here. I used this knowledge to write a specialized AntBuilder for

Error rendering macro 'link' : Link needs a name and a URL as arguments.

. This "MacroStepBuilder" allows using the Canoo WebTest "steps" (that walk through a webapp for testing) from Groovy Code. Groovy has now become a first-class citizen in the

Error rendering macro 'link' : Link needs a name and a URL as arguments.

.

When writing the above test I stumbled over a few things, here are two of them:

I was not able to write a fully fledged subclass of GroovyTestCase with separate methods for the various tests. I couldn't find out how to make the SpoofBuilder an inner class of my TestCase. I would very much appreciate help on this.

Coming from Ruby I expected the << operator on Strings to operate on the String itself (like it does on Lists) rather than giving back a modified copy. It appears to me that << on Strings and on Lists is not consistent. Same with the "+" operator.

What I especially appreciated:

== on Lists is clear and compact

display of evaluated expression when assert fails saves a lot of work when writing assertions. Most of the time you need no extra message.